Starmer says closer ties with EU single market preferable to a customs union

Closer ties with the EU single market are preferable to a customs union, Keir Starmer has said, in his clearest sign yet that the government is seeking to further deepen links with Brussels.The prime minister said the UK should consider “even closer alignment” with the single market. “If it’s in our national interest … then we should consider that, we should go that far,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.In a riposte to some cabinet colleagues who have suggested the UK should seek to form a customs union with the EU, Starmer said he did not think that was the answer. “We are better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment,” he said

‘Durham’s other cathedral’: mining union hall reopens after £14m restoration

Outside the impressively grand, Edwardian baroque building in Durham are two wooden benches, each dedicated to men who died too young.They were, the inscription reads, both “sacked and victimised” during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Yet they’re in grounds that look as if they might have been owned by rich, exploitative mine owners.The building is Redhills, the headquarters since 1915 of the Durham Miners’ Association, which has reopened after a £14m restoration with a hugely ambitious purpose that aligns with the original aims of the site.Redhills is considered one of the world’s finest trade union buildings

Reform UK says it would impose whole-life jail terms on child rapists

Child rapists would be jailed for life if Reform UK wins the next election, its head of policy has said.Under plans announced by Zia Yusuf on Saturday, the party would introduce mandatory whole-life orders for offenders convicted of the crime, making them ineligible for parole, as part of a crackdown on grooming gangs.Reform said its intention was for “mandatory minimums to apply to historic child sexual abuse to ensure that heinous historic crimes are also sentenced proportionally”.There were 677 convictions for rape of children under the age of 16 in 2024, according to Ministry of Justice data. These figures relate to the number of convictions rather than the number of people convicted

Downing Street has only itself to blame for lack of grip on Whitehall, say experts

Downing Street only has itself to blame for failing to exercise power, Whitehall experts have said, after a former No 10 adviser said that lobbying by a “political perma-class” had distracted the government from voters’ priorities.Paul Ovenden prompted a debate about how Keir Starmer’s administration is governing after criticising what he described as the “sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time”.In particular, the former Downing Street strategist highlighted the effort spent on freeing the British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who has previously posted on X about killing Zionists, saying colleagues had joked about the campaign as a “totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues”.Ovenden hit out at what he called the “supremacy of the stakeholder state”, arguing the government had been hobbled by a “complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations”, although he stressed that many civil servants themselves wanted to change the system.He claimed the stakeholder state was “incubated by a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department – one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning”

‘We were missing in the conversation’: how Zack Polanski hit on plan to beat Reform at their own game

Zack Polanski finally decided to stand as the Greens’ leader, he says, after witnessing the party being eclipsed by Reform in last May’s local elections across England, and realising that British politics had changed for good.While the Greens made yet more steady gains, Reform won nearly 700 councillors from a standing start. As deputy leader, it was Polanski’s job to speak to losing candidates to both offer consolation and ask what lessons could be learned.“The ground game was as solid and as effective as it could be,” he told the Guardian. “Where they felt we were missing was in the national conversation

Distractions over Abd el-Fattah were running joke, says ex-Starmer adviser

Efforts to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah regularly distracted Keir Starmer’s government from focusing on bread-and-butter domestic political issues, according to one of the prime minister’s closest former advisers.Paul Ovenden, who stood down last year as the prime minister’s director of strategy, said the case of the British political prisoner became a “running joke” among those in government frustrated by the slow pace of change.Abd el-Fattah’s case has dominated headlines since he was freed from an Egyptian prison to return to Britain on Boxing Day, only for a row to erupt over social media posts he wrote a decade ago in which he advocated killing Zionists.Ovenden said the amount of time dedicated to freeing Abd el-Fattah was symptomatic of a government that has struggled to stay focused on voters’ core priorities in the face of pressure from “well-connected” activist groups and arms-length bodies.“We would be having long meetings on the priorities of the government, and often they would be railroaded via any other business into discussions of this gentleman,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme